SNIBBE STUDIO RELEASES TWO AWARD-WINNING APPS FOR THE NEW LEAP MOTION PLATFORM: GRAVILUX AND OSCILLOSCOOP

San Francisco, July 22, 2013

Two award-winning iOS music apps from Snibbe Studio are now available in Leap Motion™’s new app discovery platform, the Airspace™ Store. Leap Motion’s groundbreaking new device allows people to interact with their computer screens simply by waving their hands in the air.

Gravilux for Leap Motion adapts the best-selling iOS musical star field app to a purely natural movement experience: when you point fingers at the screen they all pull on the stars, when you punch with your fist, antigravity repels. Scott Snibbe, the company’s founder, says, “With Gravilux for Leap Motion, you literally have the universe at your fingertips.”

OscilloScoop for Leap Motion allows you to make musical groves by sculpting spinning crowns with your hands. Created by DJ and designer Lukas Girling, the app mashes up turntables, video games, and electronic music into a real-time audiovisual performance. With fingers pointed directly at the screen, people sculpt spinning ‘crowns’—one for tone and one for a digital audio filter. People can also open up their hands and their fingertips directly draw waveforms for the sounds to follow.

“We are thrilled to be among the first developers releasing apps for Leap Motion, and I believe strongly that in the future gesture may dominate human-computer interaction – it’s what people are calling ‘Natural User Interface’ because we’re now communicating with the computer the same way that we communicate with other human beings,” said Scott Snibbe, the studio’s founder and CEO.

“Snibbe thinks that one of the downsides to the digitisation of music is that this falling in love stage has turned into a “casual relationship”, where people skip around albums, or listen to songs while walking, travelling and doing other things.

“You miss that falling in love period, and go immediately to the ‘brushing your teeth together in the bathroom phase’,” he said. “But an app can demand all of your senses and attention at once. That’s something exciting for musicians. A lot of them lament the demise of the album experience due to digital distribution. But one thing about the app-album is it reclaims people’s attention for an entire album.”

OscilloScoop has won the 2011 ZKM App Art Award for Technical Innovation. Only three awards are given in this first-ever prize for apps created with artistic vision and purpose. The winners were chosen from thousands of submissions worldwide, and acknowledged with cash awards totaling 25,000 euros. The OscilloScoop app, combining innovative 3D graphics with real-time electronic music creation, was developed by interactive artist Scott Snibbe, musical interaction designer Lukas Girling, and software engineer Graham McDermott.

“Carving into the rotating cylinders feels really creative and organic, very much like shaping clay on a potter’s wheel. Just like pot throwing, you can completely reshape your creation and start again if you get carried away or make a complete mess.”